King’s Speech

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a privilege to sit beside my noble friend Lord Roberts of Belgravia during his wonderful maiden speech. It is common for an author to get very irritated to have to follow another who is younger, better-looking and more intelligent, but in his case, I will make an exception.

I would like to talk about inclusion. I am a massive supporter of inclusion. It is fundamental, and look what it has done, for instance, to change the nature of our Front Benches in this House. However, I wonder why it seems that those who shout most aggressively about inclusion spend so much of their time trying to exclude others, attacking those who genuinely believe that women cannot have penises, for instance, trying to silence those silly scientists who question the logic of Just Stop Oil, or ignoring those really irritating parents who rather insist on knowing what their children are being taught.

And in respect of Jews, of course—right now, especially Jews—it is free speech, I suppose, although when it promotes violence, hatred and bloodshed, it is not free at all. It is the costliest speech imaginable.

Thank goodness, then, for safe spaces, with their shrink-wrapped minds and vacuum-packed morality, where they have never heard of McCarthyism or read any Solzhenitsyn. I was reading the Old Testament the other day—the bit about being whipped by scorpions. All that smiting and begetting is enough to turn a young man’s mind—without a single trigger warning. I do not know how I shall be able to manage.

Talking of trigger warnings, there was the 1964 election campaign in Smethwick. Forgive me, but I will not shrink from it, lest we forget it: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”. It turns my stomach to this day. It is almost impossible for a younger generation to believe it when you look at today’s Cabinet, for instance. As a country we have come so far and made so much progress. There is more to do, but we have become genuinely inclusive. Yet today that is under threat. Wedges are being driven deep by those who are trying to split us apart on lines of gender, sex, religion and, yes, once again, race.

About the time of the awful Smethwick election, another voice was raised: “I have a dream”, Martin Luther King told us almost exactly 60 years ago. It was one of the most magnificent speeches ever made in the English language. He said:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.


What a dream—but it did not stop there. He dreamed that

“one day … little black boys and black girls will … join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”.

It was a dream that we followed in this country with remarkable success, but now it is in danger, from political insights that go no deeper than T-shirt slogans, from hypersensitivity, from those who demand all their rights but will do none of their responsibilities, from those who think that it is all right to beat up on poppy collectors—so much for safe spaces—and from politicians on all sides who seem to go out of their way to use deliberately lurid and inflammatory language.

We should raise our voices too, and more frequently, to remind ourselves of all the many things that we have in common, so that we not only tolerate but celebrate our differences. It is called the vision thing—for a country safe not just for Jews but for Muslims, built on proper inclusion that, above all, includes the majority of Britons whose enduring common sense has made this one of the most tolerant places in the world. That will be this country’s best defence—defence in depth—and the most persuasive foreign policy of all.